Thursday, 7 July 2016

The Blairite coup against Jeremy Corbyn has failed

Jeremy
Corbyn smashes a record set by Tony Blair, and Labour plotters are
furious

Jeremy
Corbyn has smashed a record set by former Labour leader Tony Blair,
leaving the Labour coup in tatters.

Under
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party now has around 500,000 members
– easilysurpassing Tony
Blair’s peak of 405,000.

A
jaw dropping 100,000 members have joined since Brexit and the
subsequentcoordinated Labour
coup against Corbyn. After already being elected on
a biggerdemocratic
mandate than Blair or any British political leader, Corbyn has now
skyrocketed membership of the party above all previous records. This
is important, because it’s the members who get people out to vote
come election day.

After
Blair’s peak in 1997, Labour membership plummeted during the Iraq
war, which Corbyn vehemently
opposed.

A
half-million strong party membership, combined with hundreds
of thousands of
affiliated and registered supporters, will make the expected upcoming
leadership election much more representative of the country as a
whole. Back when Ed Miliband changed the rules give Labour members
and £3 supporters an equal vote in leadership elections, he said:

If
we can be a party of 400,000 people genuinely engaged, this will make
us more reflective of the country we seek to govern. In turn that
means Labour is less likely to lose touch in government, and instead
represent the beating heart of Britain.

Now
the party membership is way above Miliband’s target, and that’s
only the full members.

Perhaps
it is now plausible for membership of the Labour party to soar past
its highest ever, which was over a
million members in the 1950s. A membership of 500,000, plus
affiliated and registered supporters, will make Labour’s leadership
contest much more representative of the electorate than the
Conservatives’, who have only 150,000 members.

While
progressives see this as evidence of Corbyn’s widespread support,
the establishment camp maintain that some are joining to vote him
out.

New
members joining Labour are not asked whether they support the present
leader, but The
Independent reports:

Of
the new members, 20,000 have been checked and over half are thought
to have joined to support Mr Corbyn.

While
some will be joining to vote against him, it is not just
the rallies up
and down the country and the 260,000-strong petition that suggests
many share Corbyn’s views. Momentum, the grassroots campaign group
for Corbyn, has reported its
membership has doubled to over 12,000 since the coup began, coupled
with record-breaking daily donations of £11,000. The increase in
support for Momentum is particularly significant – these are not
just members, but activists dedicated to spreading Corbyn’s
policies and messages.

And
it’s not just Corbyn’s grassroots base that looks very strong.
Rejecting the no-confidence vote, over 240 Labour councillors
have signed a
letter maintaining their support for Corbyn. In a further indication
of his robust local support, aNewsnight survey
of 50 Constituency Labour Party (CLP) chairs found that
90% of them still back Corbyn. The leaders of the 12 strongest unions
in the United Kingdom also wrote a letter of
support following the attempted coup.

That
a leader can look so sturdy in the face of an 172 MP strong
no-confidence vote shows how much support he really has outside of
the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

Embarrassingly
for the plotters, the Labour coup has succeeded only in increasing
Corbyn’s support.